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on Thursday, September 1st, 2011 at 9:22 am by Radley Balko
and is filed under Forensics.
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This West guy strikes me as a sort of sociopath – he seems to be getting off on the power here. He is essentially using the legal system as the tool by which he commits his crimes against humanity and then basks in the adulation and power trip that he gets from gaining another “conviction” of someone that he knows is innocent.

Pardon my French, but this guy is a sick fuck and the only justice that I can see coming from this case is either he do the cumulative time of all the innocent people he put in jail, or one of his “victims” 10-rings him with a .45 some night – the second one only works if the victim gets away with it, though…

As Radley has pointed out many times, the problem (or, at least one of them) is that the people involved in getting convictions often go on to have the top supervisory court positions. Prosecutors become judges or heads of agencies. There is no incentive to go back and re-evaluate old cases.

So I bit the bullet late last night, registered at HuffP and submitted a (non-contentious, non-insulting) comment. There was, at the time, one posted comment and one in moderation. Now there’s two pages of presumably moderated comments; mine does not appear.

As someone who rarely comments anyway (I generally lurk until I come up with something substantive to say), this does not bode well for my continued participation over there.

As a conservative (generally, anyway), when we establish the American Theocracy that the left is convinced we are secretly plotting (oops, did I just reveal our plans?!) I’m going to put in a good word for Radley to head up the Civil Rights Inquisition.

Regarding West’s frame of mind; I wonder what it feels like to wake up one morning and realize that you have become a cartoon villain? That you are now the kind of twerp that Scooby Doo and those meddling kids unmask?

Do you think he realizes? Or has he convinced himself that he’s somehow in the right, beleaguered by the Forces of Darkness?

So a lot of comments in that link are sneering at the justice system in the south (which is eminently sneeratable, obviously). But they seem to hold up their court systems as paragons of virtue. This seems strange to me given the evidence that Chicago PD was running a torture chamber until recently, and one of the big reasons that you hear about these cases is that the Dallas AG is actually looking at the prior history of convictions. I’d bet if you cracked open any northern court system you’d find shit just as deep as that in the south.

So a lot of comments in that link are sneering at the justice system in the south (which is eminently sneeratable, obviously). But they seem to hold up their court systems as paragons of virtue.

That was exactly the point I’d made in my comment which got “disappeared.” My theory is that maybe a moderator there had some parochial bias and didn’t want any contrary ideas to challenge it. I’m sure I’ll never know the reason for sure. But poking around the web, I found these complaints (by other users of the site) very soothing:http://www.beitz.org/node/113